All topics

The encyclopedia is organized into thirteen topic clusters. Each cluster gathers articles by their conceptual neighborhood. An article may appear in more than one cluster when it sits at an intersection.

Foundations & Theory

The core theoretical apparatus of evolutionary psychology: adaptationism, inclusive fitness, gene-culture coevolution, and the levels at which selection operates on minds and behavior.

Methods & Evidence

How evolutionary psychologists actually work — the comparative method, cross-cultural studies, twin and adoption designs, experimental economics, neuroimaging, and the standards for inferring adaptation.

Mating & Sexual Selection

Mate choice, parental investment theory, sexual conflict, jealousy, and the long argument over how sexual selection has shaped human cognition and behavior.

Kinship, Cooperation & Altruism

Hamilton's rule, reciprocal altruism, kin recognition, and the evolutionary puzzles posed by cooperation among non-kin.

Aggression, Status & Coalitions

Intergroup conflict, dominance hierarchies, warfare, and the coalitional psychology that organizes much of human social life.

Cognition & Modularity

Massive modularity, cheater detection, folk biology, theory of mind, and the architecture of the evolved cognitive system.

Emotions & Motivation

Disgust, fear, attachment, and other evolved affect programs as adaptations that organize behavior in fitness-relevant domains.

Language & Culture

The evolution of language, cultural transmission, and the dual-inheritance frameworks that try to make sense of cumulative culture.

Development & Life History

Life history theory, attachment, paternal investment, and the developmental schedules that calibrate human behavior to ecological conditions.

Health, Disease & Evolutionary Medicine

Evolutionary mismatch, Darwinian medicine, and competing accounts of mental disorder as adaptation, byproduct, or breakdown.

Religion, Morality & Cooperation at Scale

Big gods, moral foundations, ritual, and the puzzle of how human cooperation scales beyond the band to nations and institutions.

Critiques & Debates

The Gould-Lewontin spandrels critique, Buller's Adapting Minds, feminist critiques, replication challenges, and the live disputes over the discipline's ambitions and methods.

History & Key Figures

Darwin, Hamilton, Williams, Trivers, Tooby & Cosmides, Buss, Pinker, and the critics — the lineage of ideas and the people who shaped them.